In Veblen's era, status was attached to the things that one had that others didn't; the act of pooling goods and services lacked prestige.
With the help of tax incentives and (for now) far cheaper land than either Shanghai or Shenzhen, officials hope to make the zone a manufacturing powerhouse for everything from aircraft and cars to microchips and chemicals.They want Tianjin city to regain its pre-Communist era status as north China's financial capital.
Since the early 1990s Shanghai has been driven by a desire to reclaim its pre-communist era status as a regional financial capital and a cosmopolitan haven for international capitalists eager to penetrate the Chinese market that lavish but raffish world immortalised in Vicki Baum's novel, "Shanghai '37".
But not Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass).. Other lawmakers and policy experts gathered at Washington's Four Seasons Hotel focused on defending the Barack Obama-era status quo against President Donald Trump's onslaught, rather than on proposing ambitious new ideas.
The House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure last Friday passed the FEMA Independence Act, which would break FEMA free of the Department of Homeland Security and restore it to its Clinton-era status as a stand-alone, Cabinet-level agency.
When talking about Activism 2.0, it would be remiss not to note that its tactics are rooted in the compelling story of Obama's election--the story of a people-powered movement, concise organizing, online campaigning in a Web 2.0 world, and an unwillingness to accept more of the Bush-era status quo.
In our digital era, such status can now be enjoyed while still overseas, in real time.
It was no doubt commonplace in the mid-1800s for white men to have sexual relations, most often forcibly, with black women, and the Stevens-Smith business partnership has been documented to be something far different from the slavery era's status quo.
During Egypt's parliamentary elections, the two main Islamists parties, the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), and the ultraconservative Nour party, which together account for more than 70% of Parliament, attacked the Mubarak-era personal status laws as an assault on family unity, as well as a contradiction to Islamic (sharia) law.
And in the Obama era Land's status as an old-fashioned culture warrior came to seem, to some members of the church, like a liability.
He survives as an ambassador from a more volatile era, and his status as a national treasure satisfies our collective need to remind ourselves how far we have come since then.
